Telecommunications companies must collect and store a large number of documents. Employees of a telecommunications company may need to access these documents periodically. For example, a telecommunications company regularly receives requests from its customers (both inter-exchange carriers and end users) to access its switches and trunks. The telecommunications company may be required by the public service commission to maintain a copy of these access service requests (“ASRs”). Other documents, such as detailed trunk records (“DTRs”), are internal documents used by telecommunications companies to provision trunks. DTRs comprise data relating to trunk options and to trunk provisioning.
These documents (e.g., ASRs and DTRs) are regularly entered and temporarily stored on mainframe database systems. For example, customers typically request service over the telephone and an operator enters the relevant information into the mainframe database system. The information entered by the operator is assembled into a report on the mainframe database system. Cover sheets for the reports, which contain summary information from the reports, are regularly printed (e.g., every morning). A person employed by the telecommunications company retrieves the report cover sheets from the printer, logs in to the mainframe database system each morning, and prints certain full reports to a paper printer based on the cover sheets. The person may, for instance, only print reports for service requests entered that same day. The person manually distributes the documents to the people that need them to do the work (e.g., provide the requested network access to the customers). The person also collects the printed documents, separates the printed documents, and files the documents in a file cabinet.
The company may be required by law or by good business-practice to maintain copies of the documents for a specified period of time. Further, technicians may need to access these documents at a later date. For example, ASRs provide important records of how customers ordered services. A technician wanting to access a particular ASR must locate the ASR in a file cabinet storage area and manually retrieve it.
It would be desirable to have a system and method that automated these tasks and provided for the electronic collection and storage of telecommunications documents. It would also be desirable for technicians to be able to access these documents using personal computers rather than accessing the mainframe database system or searching hard copies in a file cabinet.